What’s your most frustrating, rage-inducing game you yourself have played?

For me it’s hands-down Bureaucracy. I felt like throwing my computer around the room.  I’ve picked it up every couple of years but never been able to get past the first section. Curse you Douglas Adams!

I haven’t played Maupiti Island yet which has a reputation, although as I understand it most of the difficulty comes from the game wanting you to be at several places at the same time. Maybe I’ll give it a go one day.

I’ve also never had a serious sit-down with the Zork series. I’ve played around with it but put it down again after realising it would need lots of map drawing and planning to get anywhere. So that’s another one on my list.

Another candidate is Hugo II: Whodunit. Aside from the wealth of deadends, there was a narrow bridge which you had to cross using the keyboard (only keys), and if you touched the edge at any point you fell in and got your inventory items wet, which were crucial to continue. I can’t imagine how many times I had to restore to get past that bit. I never finished the game.

I also remember there being a game back in the 90s which awarded $1 million to whoever solved it first. It was said to be the most difficult adventure/puzzle game ever. Anyone remember that one? I don’t know if anyone ever solved it.

So, now it’s over to you! 

     

i Consider there is no Hard Adventures as a whole,and especially in early days you always had to find a couple of terrible Puzzles, those i think come in two Types,
one that unfairly stupidly hard that can make you Quit the Game and never launch again as if the Developer wanted to sell as much those of Hint books at the Adventures early years,or they the puzzle difficulty doesnt require Thinking (Adventuring) it requires a fast reflex , i the remember the Fight with that Beast in Dreamfall in the cave, and climbing the Bean Tree at KQ1 and climbing down the mountain KQ3 ..and so on

the other Kind of are the challenging one, that you know it only about not giving up, and you will solve it ,because you get the feeling that this puzzle in well crafted, and you just have try everything you got,to get that rewarding feeling at the end ,Like Riven’s Five Slaps Puzzle,Woodruff’s Tobozon Puzzles,Blade Runner’s Scanning Photos ...so on,

the greatness about those games that they really get you hooked, when i find a game like this i put aside all others, and sometime i think of its solution while i am lying on bed trying to sleep and many times i got the answer Right without sitting on the Game.

if you want to know the Hardest Game then i can tell those which Took the longest time to finish, Riven i had finished in slmost 45 days. Codename:Iceman took a while too.

     

The hardest and perhaps most infuriating adventure game I played is Black Dahlia. By far….(took me 5-6 months to finish it, some unfair riddles, most of them of the greatest difficulty).

Oscar - 06 September 2012 05:15 AM

I also remember there being a game back in the 90s which awarded $1 million to whoever solved it first. It was said to be the most difficult adventure/puzzle game ever. Anyone remember that one? I don’t know if anyone ever solved it.

I think you talk about the Cyprian game Opsys. Its general difficulty was madiocre to hard, but its last riddle was too hard, extremely unfair and (I am not sure about that) the solution was random.

EDIT: Since many people mention it, I also found Riven was quite challenging (took me a month or so to finish it), but I was young and naive when I first played it. However, all the riddles were fair and ther was no frustration. In fact, it still is my favourite adventure game ever.

     

Advie - 06 September 2012 06:01 AM

if you want to know the Hardest Game then i can tell those which Takes the longest time to finish, Riven i had finished in slmost 45 days. Codename:Iceman took a while too.

Sefir - 06 September 2012 06:12 AM

The hardest and perhaps most infuriating adventure game I played is Black Dahlia. By far….(took me 5-6 months to finish it, some unfair riddles, most of them of the greatest difficulty)

Wow, that’s a long time, both of you. Did you use walkthrough at all? My congratulations if you didn’t. 

I never thought to measure difficulty by length of time, probably because how much I play depends how much other stuff I’ve got on.

Once you got the hang of Riven’s logic I don’t think it’s a particularly hard game. The difficulty came because the huge, sprawling and interlocking map was the first of its kind and gamers weren’t ready for it. It would be interesting to see how people who have played the ‘clones’ first find it for difficulty.

I think A Quiet Weekend at Capri needs to be mentioned because you didn’t know where the hotspots were (if you didn’t turn on the hotspot indicator). Because the game was so huge you could play the game for months and not know about a tiny entrance to an alleyway you needed to find. The map was useless too.

     

Yeah, I agree with Capri (beautiful), Black Dahlia (good story) and Bureaucracy, which I tried once and that was it. I’ll add The Space Bar (great game in other respects), Discworld 1 (very funny) and The Feeble Files (a couple of extremely hard puzzles) 

In the category both cruel and utterly boring I’ll add Schizm.

     

I probably would say the 2 hardest I can think of are The Feeble Files and The Neverhood. then again I’m not a veteran of the adventure genre like most people here

     

Fien - 06 September 2012 09:57 AM

I’ll add The Space Bar

Now that you mention it Fien, we need you to show us the way in the community playthrough…

 

     

Yes, I hadn’t forgotten Sefir. But you must be ahead of me by now, cause you managed to catch Cilia and she should be the next one to tackle.

     

For me the hardest was Chemicus. I didn’t have much trouble with Physicus or Bioscopia.

     

There were a couple of games in my pre-internet era that I never finished because I was stuck beyond help.

Out of those, KGB / Conspiracy was one of the most difficult (plenty of deaths and dead ends as well), even with the available in-game “help” from you character’s deceased father (played by a FMV Donald Sutherland).

Post-internet I just never got stuck too long, because a walkthrough was always within reach.

Although I’m currently persevering and fighting the appeal of walkthroughs, The Space Bar is proving to be one of the most difficult games as well…

     

Dara100 - 06 September 2012 02:53 PM

I don’t remember the games mentioned being particularly difficult.

Can somebody open a window please? 

And Blue Ice? Snort.

     

Conquest of the Longbow, The Space Bar, anything by Legend with parser… Black Dahlia surely and couple of more Myst clones, like Timelapse which was notorious of its difficulty in a domestic computer magazine. I wanted to make sure of it and I did - never got around the first few screens.

     

GreyFuss - 06 September 2012 03:40 PM

For me the hardest was Chemicus. I didn’t have much trouble with Physicus or Bioscopia.

Interesting, I avoided these because I assumed they would be low-level educational. I might take a look, even though I specifically suck at physics.

diego - 06 September 2012 05:08 PM

anything by Legend with parser…

Nooo….. Really? Infocom games were substantially harder.

     

Oscar - 06 September 2012 05:16 PM

Nooo….. Really? Infocom games were substantially harder.

Well, I don’t doubt that, but I haven’t really experienced the IF era, so I didn’t count them in. Like old Sierra games, which would be on top of the list as well, but then we would have to pay attention to things such as justified and unjustified difficulty.